Kazuo Hirai Holds Conference to Explain Themselves

Sony held a press con­fer­ence at 2pm Japan time, 1 am east­ern time to dis­cuss the future of the Playsta­tion Net­work and the issues. Present at the con­fer­ence were Kazuo Hirai (Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Cor­po­rate Exec­u­tive Offi­cer), Shin­ji Hase­ji­ma (Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, Chief Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer) and Shi­ro Kambe (Senior Vice Pres­i­dent, Sony Cor­po­ra­tion
Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions). They did con­firm it was an out­side intu­sion and of course they gave the “We’re Sor­ry”, but they also gave us an idea of whats to come. Here are the major items:
— Adding a new data sys­tem and mov­ing it to a new loca­tion
— New intru­sion soft­ware
— There will be a soft­ware update to change your pass­word when PSN is back online
— They asked the 70 mil­lion plus sub­scribers to check all per­son­al info and pur­chase his­to­ry for any anom­alies
— Sony asks you check all pass­words and login info you may use for oth­er things ( any­thing sim­i­lar to your PSN login)
— Sony will NOT con­tact you for any per­son­al infor­ma­tion ( so if some­one calls or emails you ask­ing, its not Sony)
— There was no evi­dence of cred­it card info theft, but Sony is con­sid­er­ing com­pen­sa­tion for any loss­es and re-issue of cred­it card. Also no mis­use or cred­it cards have been report­ed
— Playsta­tion Net­work ser­vices will begin to come back online with­in the week (online game­play, movies, Playsta­tion Home)
— Playsta­tion Store and all oth­er ser­vices will be online with­in the month
— When Playsta­tion Net­work returns, mem­bers will recieve a 30-day free tri­al for Playsta­tion Plus as well as Qri­oc­i­ty
Kazuo went on to say they will learn from this expe­ri­ence and con­tin­ue to com­bat threats against the com­pa­ny and con­tin­ue to enhance the over­all secu­ri­ty for the future. Sony will con­tin­ue to give us more infor­ma­tion as it becomes avail­able.

8 comments

Thats an inter­st­ing state­ment but yet it real­ly does­n’t give any timetable as to when things will be fixed. With­in the month is a long time as it is now may in Japan and this could be anoth­er 30+ days before this issue is resolved.
Grant­ed I should men­tion that PSN is a free ser­vice so in essence PS3 users aren’t loos­ing any­thing except time to play mul­ti­play­er.
Mov­ing data from one dat­a­cen­ter to anoth­er could be a ter­ri­bly com­plex process. I find this report… dis­turb­ing.

I actu­al­ly got to watch this live via web stream and I got the feel­ing that they were in a “oh sh!t” moment. They were very apolo­getic and the press there were ham­mer­ing them with the tough ques­tions.
As for the time tables and such, I kin­da see why they wait­ed till the 1st of the month to do this press conference.…they can give a time table and still give them­selves plen­ty of time.
We’ll have to see how truth­ful they are and see if we can play online some­time this week. I have Socom 4 just lay­ing there life­less­ly, so fin­gers crossed

It’s real­ly hard for me to say much about this, as I have nev­er owned ANY Playsta­tion. They’re obvi­ous­ly stuck in a bad spot as they’ve got the whole “bad guy” por­trait, and now folk­s’s online mul­ti­play­er is gone. You think they’ll be attacked again?

these guys should have been pro and done it to the xbox net­work, seri­ous­ly microsoft­’s ima charge you for every­thing pol­i­cy sucks. playsta­tion gave us free online play and inter­net brows­ing blu-ray all the can­dies and some jack fuck had to and mess it up for every­one. just great…

The old adage ‘you get what you pay for’ rings true here though. I’ve always found PSN to be slow­er and less orga­nized than Xbox Live, and I’ve always sus­pect­ed that PSN’s secu­ri­ty was nowhere near as com­plex.
Let’s face it, Sony is a hard­ware com­pa­ny. Set­ting up com­plex gam­ing net­works is not going to be a strong suit. Hack­ers go for easy tar­gets, and with all the poten­tial cred­it card farm­ing they may have got­ten away with..well..I would­n’t expect to see any­thing stel­lar in the way of timeta­bles.

I’m sure XBL, Steam, games for win­dows, etc. all get attacked reg­u­lar­ly it just hap­pens that the PSN had a gap­ing hole that was exploit­ed not to say hack­ers all are look­ing for cc#‘s and iden­i­ty theft there are some that sim­ply like the chal­lange of beat­ing the secu­ri­ty and spoof­ing around so noth­ing may come of it except for the peo­ple respon­ci­ble get­ting some chops in the hack­er com­mu­ni­ty then again I would­n’t keep the same pass­words and cc#‘s up either…
This is mak­ing Steam, and XBL look real­ly good right now and so close to G3 this could be detri­men­tal to Sony’s con­sumer out­look for the next year.